The Return of Canis lupus: The Case for Reintroduction

It had been more than 80 years since the howling of wolves last rang through the Yellowstone country of Montana and Wyoming. Once the area’s signature tune, it had been silenced by a massive, well-coordinated federal program initiated in the early years of the 20th century, when officials declared that wolves were “a decided menace to the herds of elk, deer, mountain sheep, and antelope” in Yellowstone National Park. Government rangers, contract hunters, and soldiers trapped, burned, and shot Yellowstone’s wolves by the hundreds, working so efficiently that in 1926 the gray, or timber, wolf (Canis lupus) was declared officially eradicated from the region. The process was repeated elsewhere in the United States, until the wolf was almost extinct in the lower 48.

Eight decades later, Canis lupus returned to Yellowstone, thanks to another massive campaign of federal action. Biologists agreed that, yes, wolves are a “menace” to the park’s ungulate population—but also that wolf predation is an essential element in maintaining the health of the Yellowstone ecosystem, without which populations of deer and other browsers would grow to pest levels.

And so the wolves are back, as many as 1,500 of them now, removed from the list of federally protected species—though for reasons more political than biological or demographic.

The reintroduction did not come easily. When proponents first sounded a proposal to reintroduce “viable wolf populations” in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they raised a storm of controversy, especially among local ranchers. The Greater Yellowstone Coalition, Defenders of Wildlife, and other environmental groups responded by launching a massive campaign to raise public awareness, and it worked. Interior Department hearings on the proposed reintroduction produced some 160,000 letters from across the country. Activist Thomas McNamee, the author of The Return of the Wolf to Yellowstone (and no known relation to me), calls this outpouring “the biggest official citizen response to any federal action ever.”

The environmentalists won. They won because reputable biological opinion is undivided: wolves play an essential role in the forest ecosystem, a role that does not admit stand-ins. They won, too, because by every measure, in survey after survey, most Americans want to see wolves in the wild. Polls undertaken in Wyoming, Idaho, and Colorado show that a clear majority—nearly 70 percent—of residents supports reintroduction there. A similar number of residents of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, many of whom identified themselves as sport hunters, supported returning the wolf to the wild. In polls conducted at Yellowstone and Rocky Mountain national parks, 78 percent of visitors favored reintroduction.

Thanks to this public support, the wolves are back in Yellowstone, followed soon after by reintroduced populations in the broken canyons and forests of Arizona and New Mexico, with pockets in Idaho and Louisiana and planned or under-review reintroductions in Colorado, New York, even Louisiana.

Those who oppose the wolf’s reintroduction to the wild have raised objections that fall into four broad categories: economic, political, biological, and ethical. The economic argument is by far the most widely voiced, and it has many components.

In the West, where most reintroduction actions are now taking place, the cattle industry is the wolf’s chief foe. Many ranchers are convinced that the wolf is, to quote an industry spokesman, “a specialist in carnage” that brings “professional skill to the slaughter of cattle.”

Those words are from the end of the 19th century. It is to another rancher of that bygone era, who complained to Congress that wolves were destroying half a million head of his cattle each year, that we owe the federal government’s establishing the first program to destroy predators like the wolf and bear, a legacy that remains with us in the form of various animal-control agencies. The rancher, a gifted master of exaggeration, found a sympathetic audience in government confidants like the hunter and writer William Hornaday, who remarked, “Of all the wild creatures in North America, none are more despicable than wolves. There is no depth of meanness, treachery or cruelty to which they do not cheerfully descend. They are the only animals on earth which make a regular practice of killing and devouring their wounded companions, and eating their own dead.”

Similar rhetoric has resounded in recent years, issued by anti-reintroduction groups like the deceptively named Abundant Wildlife Society of North America. But it is false. Wolves are not cannibalistic, and they prefer ungulates—a reindeer herd in Lapland, say, or deer in North America—to cows and sheep. Numerous studies show that where canid predators have attacked livestock, the culprits are almost always feral dogs, and not wolves, although reintroduced wolves have indeed attacked livestock at Yellowstone.

A wrinkle on the economic argument is that the reintroduction of wolves will reduce the number of hunting permits made available to human hunters. This is possible, although it has not yet come to pass. A healthy population of reintroduced wolves will certainly reduce the numbers of so-called weed species like deer in the vicinity—and, as anyone who has driven down the New York Turnpike can tell you, too-abundant deer are a major problem in many parts of the country. This eliminates the need for hunting as a wildlife management tool, but it does not obviate sport hunting. Aldo Leopold, the great game-animal biologist, wrote after helping clear the Gila headwaters of Arizona and New Mexico of wolves, “I thought because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise.” What no wolves meant instead was an explosion of the deer population, and, in turn, ruined forests.

Another anti-reintroduction argument holds that Canis lupus is a threat to humans—especially tourists, who will disappear from areas in which wolves roam free. A rancher on the Blue River of Arizona once said to me, “Wolves aren’t known to be friendly creatures. Of course we’re worried about losing our stock. We’re also worried about what will happen to our recreation industry. Lots of people hike up here, and they’ll go someplace else when the wolves start attacking them.”

The rancher has a point. Wolves have indeed threatened humans. Observes High Country News writer Ray Ring, “Wolves that are habituated to people—for food scraps, for instance—tend to be the culprits. But Valerius Geist, a respected Canadian animal behaviorist whose studies Gillett often cites, says it’s time to end the ‘harmless-wolf myth’. Geist says North American wolves had grown ‘extremely shy’ of people, after decades of being poisoned and shot and trapped. Now, however, they’re less afraid, and more likely to attack. Geist says he had to shoot a couple of wolves a few years ago in self-defense. Wolves kill people in places like Russia, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, Geist adds; why should we expect to fare differently?”

Still, wolves tend to shyness, and, if it’s not anthropomorphizing to say so, to hold humans in fairly high regard. In his famous study The Wolves of Mount McKinley, published in 1944, Adolph Murie observed, “The strongest impression remaining with me after watching . . . wolves on numerous occasions was their friendliness.”

Far from driving away tourists, wolves are instead drawing them to places like Yellowstone and Isle Royale National Park, where, according to natural-resources specialist R. Gerald Wright, “The first question visitors ask park staff . . . usually concerns the status of the wolves. The wolf has essentially molded the visitors’ perception of Isle Royale and is a major attraction.” And, as a casual visit to Yellowstone National Park can confirm, the reintroduced wolves have become a fresh source of revenue. Stores in and around the park enjoy brisk sales of wolf-related merchandise; local hunting outfitters now realize a significant part of their incomes from guided tours to shoot wolves—with cameras. A University of Montana study suggests that at least $25 million has been added to the local economy each year since 1995 thanks to the wolves.

The final economic argument holds that wolf recovery is economically costly. Although no one yet knows the final price tag for the federal government’s various reintroduction programs, the objection is correct. Recovery is an expensive business. But it is far less expensive than rehabilitating ecosystems damaged by too many browsers such as deer.

The second complex of arguments is political. I have heard it leveled that a cabal of eastern liberals—always a ready bogeyman in the West, where I live—is seeking to return the wolf to areas the wolf never occupied for reasons known only to them. (This argument is refuted by even a cursory glance at the literature, which is full of habitat maps and historic-range studies showing that wolves are being reintroduced only to native ground.) These same eastern liberals and their wooly environmentalist allies are doing this, the argument continues, in order to seize the land from those who work it. “It’s not the predators we’re afraid of. It’s the government we’re afraid of,” said Al Schneberger, director of the New Mexico Cattle Growers Association at a public hearing in 1996.

This much is certain: wilderness is everywhere under siege. Securing territory for the wolves is a complex and controversial venture. Still more controversial is the protection of wolf habitat, of habitat suited to all kinds of predators and prey. Wolves need lots of room to roam, just as do almost all large mammal species. It is for that reason that the Humane Society of America initially opposed the Northern Rocky Mountain Gray Wolf Restoration Act of 1990, saying that the territory proposed for protection was too limited to be of much good to Canis lupus.

One of my favorite arguments for sheer missing-the-pointedness comes from columnist Harry Rosenfeld, writing in the Albany Times Union against the reintroduction of wolves in the Adirondacks. He suggests that rural New Yorkers will flee their homes in terror if the wolves return, and that their flight, with a resulting loss in population, will mean fewer congressional votes for the area. “Just how many more seats do we want to lose to the likes of Texas and Florida?” Rosenfeld asks. “You notice that no one there is campaigning on behalf of the wolf.”

In fact, Texans and Floridians are campaigning for the wolf. So are Americans everywhere, Americans who recognize that public lands are in fact just that, public, and not the extension of private ranches or local municipalities. The weak political arguments against reintroduction suggest that the wolves are not really the issue. What is instead at cause are states’ rights, the political power of local people over federal agencies, and other mixed—and tired—agenda. Those arguments perhaps deserve another airing, but Canis lupus is utterly incidental to them.

A third set of arguments against reintroduction is biological in nature, and some of them come even from those who are sympathetic to wolves. One disputes the ability of wolves brought up in pens to adapt to conditions in the wild, though the reintroduction at Yellowstone shows that the wolves are taking to the wild just fine. Of more concern, especially in light of recent brucellosis outbreaks among Yellowstone bison, is whether wolves will spread disease to animals and humans. Wolves are susceptible to brucellosis, canine parvovirus, and other diseases, it is true, and especially to rabies. But so, too, are skunks, bats, foxes, coyotes, and even squirrels. Says public-health officer Craig Levy, “Wolves, being more cautious of contact with other creatures, are probably safer than coyotes. They’re smart, and they tend to stay away from danger.”

The fourth argument is ethical. Is reintroducing Canis lupus truly to the benefit of the creature itself? Or does it instead only satisfy our own aesthetic pleasure, assuage the dreams of guilt-laden urban environmentalists? Is bringing back a species from the brink of extinction akin morally to keeping a brain-dead patient alive on a respirator, hoping against hope?

It seems to me that our forebears tried their best to play God by removing the wolf from the wild in the first place, remaking creation to suit their own ends. “Impossible to imagine how dangerous the world will be without animals,” the Bulgarian writer Elias Canetti presciently jotted in a diary written in the midst of World War II, in a dangerous world indeed. In our time, large-animal species are being daily destroyed. Fewer than 5,000 tigers are now thought to exist the world over. Lions, cheetahs, and other big cats are disappearing from the African prairies. Elephants, gorillas, whales are being marched off to extinction by what game biologists dryly deem “human-caused mortality.” In such a climate, in the face of all this death, I believe that we serve the deity and the world well by doing what we can to turn back time, if just a little.

Unless a political regime less friendly to the wild even than the present one comes to power, wolves will soon again return elsewhere in North America. This is just as it should be, and I have heard no compelling argument—economic, political, biological, or ethical—why Canis lupus should not have a place there. Favor for reintroduction continues to grow, and in unexpected quarters. One elderly Arizona rancher told me how his father had killed a pack of wolves living on their old spread. “I never heard one since,” he said. “But I wouldn’t mind hearing a few wolves before I die, even though I’m a little bit scared of them.”

I wouldn’t mind, either.

—Gregory McNamee

Image: Adult wolves and cub, Montana—Tom Brakefield/Corbis.

UPDATE, September 2008:The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service asked a judge in Montana to put gray wolves in the Northern Rockies back on the endangered species list, which would reverse a proposal made earlier in the year to take them off the list. Several days later, a federal court overturned the Bush administration’s decision to take the gray wolf (western Great Lakes region) off the endangered species list. The reversal will protect some 4,000 gray wolves in Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin. It will bar citizens from killing wolves who attack livestock or pets, and the states will not be permitted to allow the hunting or trapping of wolves, although none had done so.

Books We Like

Comeback Wolves, winner of the 2005 Colorado Book Award, is a collection of writings by 50 Western United States writers on the subject of the return of wolves to Colorado. The essays and poems are not all in favor of wolves or their comeback to the state, and the writers’ perspectives reflect their views as environmentalists, artists, and outdoors enthusiasts as well as people who earn their living from the land.

For decades after 1935, not one wolf was officially sighted in the state of Colorado, where the predator had been deliberately eradicated in order to protect commercial ranching. But in 2004 a female wolf was found dead on a Colorado interstate highway; she had been radio-collared the previous year in Yellowstone National Park (where a wolf reintroduction program was in place), and it was presumed that she had traveled those hundreds of miles looking for a mate before meeting her sad fate. Her discovery heralded the likely return of her species not only to Colorado but also to other Western states where the wolf was once common.

Reaction was mixed, although wolf admirers were pleased. Editor Gary Wockner says of this collection, “Our purpose is to try to sway public policy more favorably toward wolves in Colorado and the Southwest.” This eclectic group of writings is the result. As one reviewer and contributor to the book, George Sibley, adds, “It is also an interesting and often beautiful set of meditations on nature, and on the evolving culture of what might be Earth’s first species to consciously start contemplating the fate of its own competitors in the Great Food Chain of Life.”

Hi, Gillian. We’re sorry, but the rights to the pictures in this article are not ours to give. They belong to the photographers. We paid only to reproduce them on our website. Sorry we can’t help, but we appreciate your asking. Your teacher is doing a good job! 🙂

Wow, this really gave me alot more information on the wolves reinterduction. And im glad. I’ve been needing this kind of info for a debate against my father in law. Love the pictures and thanks for publishing the article! (:

The wolves remind me of my hometown in northern wisconsin. during the summer, I was going to breakfast with my cousins and a pack of three wolves passed us, showing their massive teeth. They were grey, but one was black. There were two babies, who were very cute. Why couldn’t they move the wolves instead of killing them?

When wolves are re-introduced we should expect people to be lost, not in high numbers, but freak attacks, they are predators and predators do hunt, humans are easy prey, but they would prefer to eat bison, elk, or deer above human flesh, and it tends to be through injuries that large predators prey on man, is love to see them wild in the UK regardless of if I’m viewed as food or not.